Cataloochee A Novel

1 Too Worn Out to Cry Ezra Banks sprang from a line of men pretty good at hunting and fishing and gambling and drinking. But at farming they piddled. Tenants. Ezra, third son in a brood of seven, knew early he didn't want to sharecrop. His father farmed ten or twelve hardscrabble acres near Spring Creek in Madison County, North Carolina. The land belonged to Bingham Wright, brother to Jonathan Wright next county over, in Cataloochee. Ezra's father, a bit too old to serve in the Confederate Army, had shown up just after the war started and leased Wright's poorest section. Some pasture was so steep a fellow needed two breeds of cattle, one with short right legs to stand in one direction and pick the thistle-ridden grass, the other with short left legs to pick going the opposite way. On level ground they could lean against each other to sleep. In 1864 Ezra looked older than fourteen, lanky, a bit of beard already and a badly bent nose. His father had broken it three years before when they moved to the Wright place. The old man was trying to fix a fence gate. He banged his thumb with the claw hammer and splintered its handle when he flung it at the barn in a rage. He ran to the back porch and yanked a piece from the middle of his wife's stove-wood stack and started to whittle a new handle. As he smoothed it with his rusty hawksbill, the stack dissolved around the missing stick and fell off the porch. He yelled, "Get out here, woman, and pick up yer goddamn firewood before it rains on it." Ezra, a boy given to moodiness, had been enlisted to help but had only dragged three tulipwood laps to the stile. He stood ten feet from his father, hands in his pockets, watching him like a cat. The old man held a crosspiece in one hand and a hammer in the other and realized he needed three arms to attach it to the gate. He glared at his son. "You think you're winder decoration? Hold this damn thing for me. Right there." Ezra hastened to the other end of the board. His father struck his last tenpenny nail sidelong, pinging it off the hammer end and scattering a couple of speckled banty hens at the barn entrance. He fumbled in his overalls for another nail. "Don't jist stand there like a sumbitching wooden Indian, boy, fetch me some nails." When Ezra said, "Go get them yourself," the old man backhanded the claw hammer with no hesitation. Had Ezra not been quick he would have been dead. The jagged, rusty claw missed his nose but the hammer head's top hit home, spinning him into the dirt. "That'll learn ye to sass me, boy. Now get yer worthless ass up and fetch me them whorehopping nails fore I light into you again." Ezra got up slowly, running the back of his hand as close to his nose as pain allowed, making up his mind to leave. On a cold November Saturday just after his fourteenth birthday, Ezra saddled the horse, a gaunt, swaybacked strawberry roan, as his father's drunken snores shook the back of the house. He tied his stuff-a piece of a shovel, a clasp knife, a wooden spoon, two shirts and a pair of overalls-in a bedroll back of the ratty saddle. His mother trudged to the barn to give him a pone of corn bread and a leather pouch his old man had hidden behind a hearthstone. He felt coins inside. "Son, will I ever see you again?" He faced a woman too worn out to cry. He hugged his mother awkwardly, put on his hat, and said nothing. It would be bad for her when the old bastard finally woke to find neither horse nor saddle. Heading down the mountain he stopped and looked back. No help for it but to forge on. The journey spurred his imagination. He rode through the valley and determined one day to own a farm like Bingham Wright's. Acre upon acre of bottomland sprouted corn and oats and anything else a man cared to plant. The valley floor narrowed and the road snaked up the mountain toward Trust, a settlement that seemed gluedCaldwell, Wayne is the author of 'Cataloochee A Novel', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400063437 and ISBN 1400063434.